November 29, 2012

[Note: This is an updated version of
an essay I posted last May, when "Killing Me Softly" premiered at the
Cannes Film Festival.]

Brad Pitt's latest movie,
which opens tomorrow, is being described as an attack on capitalism, at least
as it's currently practiced in America.

When "Killing Them
Softly" premiered at Cannes last spring, an article in the Los Angeles Times called it a
"post-Occupy" film and "what the documentary 'Inside Job' might
look like if it was a fictional feature."

"Inside Job," you
may recall, is director Charles Ferguson's Oscar-winning examination of how
Wall Street speculation and duplicity led to our current economic crisis. The
action in "Killing Them Softly" takes place during the stock and
housing market crashes that got the current crisis rolling; visible in the
background are clips of presidential candidates Obama and McCain making
promises (still unfulfilled) of economic reform. Director Andrew Dominik's
underlying theme, according to the Times, "is that U.S. capitalism is
deeply flawed, and that government, whether Democrat or Republican, has let
down its people."

I mention this here because
"Killing Them Softly" demonstrates a theme I've written about in this space: the symbiotic relationship between capitalism and technology.
It also demonstrates the contradictions inherent in trying to use the tools of
that symbiotic relationship to attack it.

"Killing Them
Softly" was financed by Megan Ellison, the daughter of Larry Ellison, the
co-founder and chief executive officer of the software company, Oracle. The
third richest man in America, Ellison is reportedly worth more than $35
billion, a fortune produced by that magically powerful combination of – you
guessed it – technology and capitalism. Brad Pitt, of course, is one of the
biggest movie stars in the world, an icon whose stature is a product of that
same magical combination (in addition to good looks and acting talent).

As I noted in my earlier commentary, you can argue that capitalism is the driving force behind technology or you can argue that technology is the driving force behind capitalism. That's what I mean when I say the relationship between the two is symbiotic. Sometimes technology stimulates capitalism, other times capitalism stimulates
technology. At their present state of development in advanced technological/capitalist
societies, neither could exist without the other.

I'm an admirer of Brad Pitt, who, like George Clooney, has gone out of his way
to use his Hollywood clout to make meaningful movies, both as works of
cinematic art and as commentaries on important issues of the day. Not every
film Pitt and Clooney make fits that category, but they're obviously trying.
The problem, as I'm sure they know, is that those films owe their existence to
a system that's responsible, in many ways, for the injustices they're trying
to address. If the films are successful they also feed that system.

There's also a contradiction
implicit in addressing real-life issues through a technological medium that
sells dreams. "Killing Them Softly," says the Times, "is a
hit-man movie, albeit an arthouse one, and contains many of the schemes and
stylized violence you might expect from a film with that label." This is
reminiscent of "The Godfather," surely one of the most profitable
anti-capitalist films in Hollywood history. I'm not saying that art can't have
an impact. I am saying that we don't strike a meaningful blow against the
empire by spending ten dollars or more to watch a make-believe assassin pretend
to kill people.

My favorite example of this
contradiction is the DreamWorks logo, a silhouette of a boy with a fishing
pole, sitting, one imagines, by a peaceful lake on a summer's afternoon, lost
in a reverie. This, of course, is exactly the sort of old-fashioned pastime
that DreamWorks, with all the technological and marketing power at its
disposal, is doing its best to make obsolete. Boys won't be spending their
summer afternoons lolling peacefully by lakes if DreamWorks has anything to say
about it. Rather, they'll be sitting inside multiplexes in shopping malls,
hypnotized by reveries conjured for them by the latest extravaganzas of
computer animation.

November 15, 2012

As many have noted, technology – specifically, email
accounts – played a central role in the ongoing scandal involving the
resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus. "Harassing" emails sent
to socialite Jill Kelley led to the FBI's discovery of emails that revealed
Petraeus' affair with Paula Broadwell; other emails led to the discovery of
questionable exchanges between Kelly and another top-ranking official, General
John R. Allen; subsequent searches found classified documents on the hard
drives of individuals who weren't authorized to have them.

With the indispensible assistance of the media,
reverberations have been ricocheting furiously up and down the corridors of
power and gossip from Washington and Langley to Florida, Afghanistan, and Libya
since the scandal broke last Friday. It's not the first time these elements
have combined to produce a sensation, but it’s the messiest we've seen lately.

The Petraeus scandal demonstrates the dynamics of a
phenomenon known in organization theory as the "tightly coupled
system." The concept was introduced by Charles Perrow in his 1999 book, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk
Technologies. Computer programmers use the term to
describe systems in which central processing units share some or all of the system’s memory
and input/output resources.

The elements at play in
the Petraeus scandal are more heavily weighted toward the human than the
examples Perrow deals with in his book, which include nuclear and petrochemical
plants, airplanes, mines, and weapons systems. Nonetheless, because his
emphasis is so strongly systemic, and because the systems in question always
rely on some combination of technology and human beings, his ideas can be
fairly applied.

Interconnections too complicated to imagine

As the name implies, tight coupling describes a system in
which an intimate connection exists, intentionally or not, between its
component parts. This connection creates a potentially volatile interdependence
as changes in one element of the system quickly reverberate throughout, setting
off a chain reaction of associated effects. A simple example is a freeway at
rush hour, when a stalled car in one lane causes a backup that stretches for
miles.

The stalled car example demonstrates, as does the Petraeus
scandal, that in tightly coupled systems small events can quickly mushroom into
crises on a different order of magnitude. After-the-fact accident analyses, Perrow says,
consistently reveal "the banality and triviality behind most catastrophes."

Perrow writes somewhat ruefully that all too often it's the
human factor that introduces the fatal flaw into technological systems that
are, because of their complexity, already primed for error. "Time and
again warnings are ignored, unnecessary risks taken, sloppy work done,
deception and downright lying practiced," he says. "Routine
sins" plus technology equal "very nonroutine" consequences.

Perrow also stresses that, as careful as we think we are,
it's impossible to anticipate every consequence of any action taken within a
tightly coupled system – the potential reverberations are beyond our
comprehension. What we see isn't only unexpected, he adds, it's often, at least
for awhile, "incomprehensible." This can be true either because we're
not aware of the consequences as they gather momentum, or because we're aware
of them but can't bring ourselves to believe they're really happening. One
assumes the principles in the Petraeus scandal have experienced both
conditions.

Note: An earlier
essay in this space discussed the part that the dynamics of
tightly coupled systems played in the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

.

"Everything is Connected" is a recurring feature named in honor
of the late Barry Commoner's four laws of ecology: Everything is connected to
everything else, everything must go somewhere, nature knows best, and there is
no such thing as a free lunch.

November 11, 2012

So much for denial. A
report commissioned by the CIA and other security agencies confronts
head on what our political leaders are afraid to mention: The various forms of chaos
that will be unleashed by global warming.

Among developments the
report says that the nation's defense and intelligence establishments need to prepare for, according to the New York Times:

large populations displaced by flood and famine,

rampant spread of disease,

increasing conflict over decreasing resources,

relief agencies overwhelmed by the scope and
scale of need, and

the necessity of military action to curb
violence or protect vital interests.

The report predicts that global warming will impose what the Times describes as "unparalleled strains" on government resources in the coming years. These strains will be the result of "more
frequent but unpredictable crises in water supplies, food markets, energy
supply chains and public health systems."

The National Research
Council, which the Times calls
"the nation’s top scientific research group," produced the report. It was originally to be
presented to intelligence officials on the day Hurricane Sandy hit the East
Coast, but had to be delayed because the federal government was shut down. Lead author John D. Steinbruner told the Times that Sandy provided a preview of the sorts of disruptions we can expect to see more of in
the future.

"You can debate the specific
contribution of global warming to that storm," he said. "But we’re
saying climate extremes are going to be more frequent, and this was an example
of what they could mean. We’re also saying it could get a whole lot worse than
that.”

Post-Sandy repairs, Bronx, New York

The report says the U.S.
military is not taking adequate steps to prepare for the disruptions that are
expected to occur. It specifically warns of the collapse of "globally
integrated systems that provide for human well-being." That's a reference
to a condition I've written about frequently in this space, "technological autonomy," a shorthand way of describing the fact that nations around
the world are now utterly dependent on massively complex, tightly coupled
technological systems that are highly vulnerable to chain-reaction breakdowns.

The Times article ends by noting that even as the urgency of preparing
for global warming has grown, the willingness of politicians to provide the
funding necessary to do so has declined.

"Everything is Connected" is a recurring feature named in honor
of the late Barry Commoner's four laws of ecology: Everything is connected to
everything else, everything must go somewhere, nature knows best, and there is
no such thing as a free lunch.

November 4, 2012

I avoid political commentary in this space
because that's not what it's here for, and there are plenty of places to go for
that. I try to keep my focus on technology and its effects, which as focuses go
is plenty expansive enough.

My comments here are not as much a departure
from that policy as they might seem. The intention isn't to denounce Mitt Romney,
but rather to note how clearly some of his campaign statements echo the ideas
contained in Martin Heidegger's seminal essay, "The Question Concerning Technology."
(Yes, I borrowed his title for my blog.)

When Romney was interviewed in January by members of the editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal, he was asked about the federal government's
massive landholdings in Nevada. If elected President, would he be willing to
turn over some portion of those holdings to the state? Here's his response:

I don’t know the reason that the federal
government owns such a large share of Nevada. And when I was in Utah at
the Olympics there I heard a similar refrain there. What they were
concerned about was that the government would step in and say, “We’re taking
this” — which by the way has extraordinary coal reserves — “and we’re not going
to let you develop these coal reserves.” I mean, it drove the people
nuts.

Unless there’s a valid, and legitimate, and
compelling governmental purpose, I don’t know why the government
owns so much of this land. So I haven’t studied it, what
the purpose is of the land, so I don’t want to say, "Oh,
I’m about to hand it over." But where government ownership of
land is designed to satisfy, let’s say, the most extreme environmentalists,
from keeping a population from developing their coal, their gold, their other
resources for the benefit of the state, I would
find that to be unacceptable.

Again, the point here isn't to paint Romney as some sort of right-wing fanatic. To the
contrary, he's far from the only politician, Republican or Democrat, to
see economic growth as the cure for all that ails us. It was specifically his inability to
comprehend the "purpose" of undeveloped public lands that made me
think of Heidegger.

Nuclear power on the Rhine, one of Heidegger's examples

of nature transformed into "standing reserve"

Heidegger was among those who defined
technology as a way of thinking as well as a collection of machines. From a
technological perspective, he said, nature has no value simply for what it is.
Rather its worth is contained entirely in its usefulness as a means to produce
something else. A river, a mountain, a forest – all are merely repositories of
potential power, or what Heidegger called "standing reserve." This standing reserve must be extracted
aggressively, by "setting upon" the natural world in "a
revealing that challenges." Technology's aggression is narrow as well as
relentless: It "blocks the shining
forth and holding sway of truth.”

It would be easy for any politician to
dismiss Heidegger as an ivory tower academic hopelessly removed from real-world
concerns. And of course Heidegger's own political affiliations
hardly inspire confidence in his epistemology. That's unfortunate, because
his insights into the nature of technology are profound and important.

To argue today that a form of truth
"shines forth" in nature, and that such a truth has value that can't
be measured in dollars, seems hopelessly naïve. Even environmentalists felt
compelled to respond to Romney's comments by pointing out that Nevada's
national parks attract tourists who contribute millions to the state's economy.
For conservatives in particular, conservation seems to have become a dirty
word. The tragedy is that all too often in our history, "natural resources"
development leaves precious little that is "natural" behind.

November 1, 2012

According to the New
York Times, it's too early for climate scientists to say with assurance
that Hurricane Sandy was a manifestation of global warming. Whatever their
ultimate verdict, the storm provided some alluring previews of what we can look
forward to as climate change takes hold.

Case in point: massive
gridlock in New York City as a result of Sandy's impact on subways and
trains.

The New
York Post headlined its story on the situation "Now Sandy is Driving
Us Mad." Here's an excerpt:

An unprecedented crush of
cars, trucks and pedestrians clogged the streets of Manhattan from river to
river yesterday, bringing the city to a virtual halt — leading Mayor Bloomberg
to impose emergency High Occupancy Vehicle restrictions to avoid similar chaos
today.

An endless line of cars
poured into the city throughout the day — but many drivers ditched their
vehicles when they landed in a gridlock nightmare, and concluded their commutes
on foot.

Bloomberg responded to the
traffic hell by ordering carpooling on all major crossings except the George
Washington Bridge.

"Everything
is Connected" is a recurring feature named in
honor of the late Barry Commoner's four laws of ecology: Everything is connected to everything
else, everything must go somewhere, nature knows best, and there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Photo credit:: Andrew
Gombert/European Pressphoto Agency via New York Times

About Me

I'm a journalist who has spent the past 20 years studying the history and philosophy of technology. I am currently submitting my book, "Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology," to publishers.
This blog comments on issues concerning technology as they arise in current events or in my ongoing studies. Follow me on Twitter at @DougHill25